I raised my portrait price by 800 euros and lost the client. Both things are fine.
For eleven years I charged 3,200 euros for a portrait, half-length, one figure, hands extra if they wanted hands. Eleven years, same number. It stopped being a price and became a fact of nature, like the weather in Lyon in February.
Last autumn I did the calculation properly for the first time. Drying time with a slow-drying medium, the sittings, three of which the client cancels, the photographs, the drawings on paper before a brush touches the panel, the palette, the varnish, the six weeks of thinking about it while doing something else. At 3,200 I was making less per hour than the man who repairs my frames, and he does not have to be charming for two hours at a time.
So I quoted 4,000 to a woman in Villeurbanne. Good project, an interior with her mother's armchair in it that I actually wanted to paint. She wrote back that it was above what she had in mind and thanked me politely.
I felt sick for two days. Then I felt fine, and then better than fine. Because I realised the old number was not a price, it was a fear with a number attached to it, and I had been paying that fear in hours of my life.
The next one, a man in the sixth arrondissement, did not blink at 4,000. I spent the extra 800 on a better panel and a lot of cadmium I did not strictly need.
I am not telling anyone to double their prices. I am telling you that the number you are scared to say out loud is probably the correct one and the fear is just the fear.
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The part I keep thinking about is the six weeks of thinking while doing something else. That is the work, and it is the first thing to vanish from a price, because nobody can see it and so it stops existing. I have the same trouble with editions: people accept the printing time, they do not accept the hours of deciding what not to print. You priced the invisible part and lost a client over it, which is honestly the only way to find out who was buying the object and who was buying you.
The editions point is sharp and it cuts both ways. A number on a print makes the invisible work official, but it also gives people something to hold, and once they can hold it they think they own the thinking too. I stopped numbering things for a while out of spite. It did not help, it just made the gallery nervous. The deciding what not to print is the whole thing, though. Anyone who has not sat with that does not know what they are buying.
The gallery getting nervous, yes. Nothing terrifies a dealer like an artist deciding something on purpose that wasn't discussed. But I think you're right that the spite version doesn't work, because stopping the numbers doesn't remove the wanting to own; it only removes the thing they could point at. Better to keep the number and let it mean less.
What you say about the thinking being the thing they buy is the part I'd underline. The print at least has the plate, the paper, the fact of an object. A portrait has the six weeks and then the client lives in the same room as it, so they feel entitled to the six weeks too. That's the trap. I have started saying the number out loud, plainly, before the sittings, and it changes the room. Some people leave. The ones who stay sit differently.
The editions comparison is exact, and worse for you because a print has a number on it. People see 3/25 and think the edition is the work. The deciding what not to print is invisible twice over, once because nobody sees the thinking and once because the thing you didn't print doesn't exist to be seen. You are pricing an absence.
And yes. The person who left was buying a portrait of a certain size for a certain number. The one who stayed is buying the six weeks. It took me a while to be at peace with that, but there it is.